CatalystNeuro is a distributed company. On any given day our team is working from Italy, Hungary, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Spain, and California, stitched together by video calls, pull requests, and a very active Slack. It works well. But once a year we get everyone into the same building, and this spring that building was a villa in the hills above Nice, in the south of France.
We arrived on Monday, May 25, settled into the house in Roquefort-les-Pins, and spent the first evening doing nothing more ambitious than sorting out who was sleeping where and watching the light fade over the hills. That set the tone for the week. We had a real agenda and got real work done, but we also left a lot of room for the unstructured time that turns coworkers into a team.
#Talks from across the team
One thing we wanted from this retreat was for the sessions to come from across the team rather than from the top down. We opened Tuesday with a State of the Union in the morning, celebrating the progress we have made toward our goals of open data in the 8 years since CatalystNeuro started.
In the afternoon, we came together for Susan's workshop. She had each person share a key moment from their time at the company. Hearing everyone reflect on what brought them here and what has mattered to them along the way was genuinely moving, and it reminded us how much history this team has built together even while spread across so many time zones.
For most of the week, team members took the reins and led breakout sessions on current projects and discussion topics. Alessandra walked us through building NWB conversion pipelines with AI skills, which kicked off one of the livelier discussions of the week. Alessio used his session to finalize a spike sorting NWB extension. Heberto covered a strategy session on reviewing Dandisets. Luiz presented on VAME and on our BrainLife integration. Paul covered Guppy and laid out a methodology for reuse tracking. Eivind presented NANSEN, a platform he has been developing for years to help neurophysiologists organize and analyse their data. Szonja led an open discussion on AI and the existential questions it raises for our field, which was exactly the kind of conversation that is hard to have over a video call. I closed things out with a session on applying marketing principles to how we communicate the value of open neuroscience data, and how we reach the labs that stand to benefit most from it.
#The place
We took advantage of being on the Côte d'Azur. The highlight was a sunset boat tour out of Nice, with wine and local snacks, watching the coastline turn gold as the sun went down. It was the kind of evening that does not need a justification on a meeting agenda.
We also made shorter trips to Grasse and to the hilltop village of Saint Paul de Vence, swam in the Mediterranean, had a BBQ back at the house, and shared a few good dinners out.
#What we took away
When we sat down at the end of the week and asked ourselves what had been most valuable, the answer was simple. It was the time together.
The distributed format of the talks was a big part of that. Because the sessions came from all over the team, everyone had a chance to teach and everyone had a chance to ask questions of someone they normally only see in a sidebar thread. But the parts people kept coming back to were the unstructured ones. The hours in the pool. The card and board games. Comparing music tastes. The meandering, late-night conversations that wandered from spike sorting to philosophy and somehow kept going past midnight.
Those moments are difficult to schedule and impossible to replicate over a screen, and they are the reason these retreats are so valuable. We came back to our separate corners of the world a little more connected than when we left.
Thanks to everyone who made the trip, and to Alessandra for the planning that made the week run as smoothly as it did. Until next year!